- Getting a healthy amount of sleep or not
- Having time to eat a proper breakfast or not
- Having time to prepare dinner (vs. order out)
- Getting that evening bike ride in before dark or not
- And on and on
I can't help but feel your response to this is part of the problem. 50 hours is a lot of hours, and we shouldn't normalize it.
This was less clear to me earlier in my career. I held a similar viewpoint for awhile. As time went on, and I saw the long term impact on those around me, and eventually myself, I shifted my viewpoint greatly.
While I absolutely agree with you, my career first as a union laborer and now a construction field engineer have really jaded me to the count of hours. It can be very different across different industries.
On my current project Engineers are expected to be present to support field operations, which means starting before the craft workers to ensure everything is ready for the day (possibly as early as 0500) while still being here until 1700 like any other 'office job'; its pretty outrageous. At least when I was a laborer I was hourly.
What can be done to fight the normalization of this? For myself, I fought my way to a senior engineer position and lobbied for a larger staff. Now I not only have enough people to do the job, but we stagger our shifts out to each get around 8hr/day while ensuring full coverage for our field guys throughout their shift. I've worked to instill a culture of "hey you've been here long enough, go the fuck home" with my team. But it took too long to get to this point, and much more tooth and nail fighting than it should have to convince higher ups of the need for what they saw as 'excess staffing', even for my department which is very much production critical.
I dunno, an extra 25% over what is normally expected? What exactly is your threshold for a ticket on the Crazy Train?
I'm actually more productive because I don't spend > 1hr socializing during the day, like I did at the office and have far fewer interruptions.
Regarding deadlines, we plan our sprints and provide estimates for all tasks. Sometimes they slip but if I spend more time one day working on something, you bet your ass that I'm leaving that same amount of hours early next Friday. It's been years since I worked 40 hours in any given week.
My current commute is about 20 minutes by car, which is the longest commute I've had in almost 20 years and I really don't like that. Prior to COVID I switched to biking to work and that was much more pleasant (40 minutes of exercise beats 20 minutes of driving hands-down for me, and we have showers at work).
working for free to meet deadlines is more a problem with the deadline than it is with your working additional hours
The collective agreement for IT service sector workers (incl. software developers) in Finland is 37.5 hours per week, so it sounds pretty crazy actually.